Those of us old enough to remember BBS servers or even rainbow banners often go down the nostalgia hole about how the internet was better “back in the day” than it is now as a handful of middlemen with a stranglehold on the way we interact with information, commerce, and even other people. Where’s the disintermediated future we were promised? More importantly, can we make a “new good web” that puts users first? [Cory Doctorow] has a plan to reverse what he’s come to call enshittification, or the lifecycle of the extractionist tech platform, and he shared it with us as the Supercon 2023 keynote.
As [Doctorow] sees it, there’s a particular arc to every evil platform’s lifecycle. First, the platform will treat its users fairly and provide enough value to accumulate as many as possible. Then, once a certain critical mass is reached, the platform pivots to exploiting those users to sell them out to the business customers of the platform. Once there’s enough buy-in by business customers, the platform squeezes both users and businesses to eke out every cent for their investors before collapsing in on itself.
Doctorow tells us, “Enshittification isn’t inevitable.” There have been tech platforms that rose and fell without it, but he describes a set of three criteria that make the process unavoidable.
- Lack of competition in the market via mergers and acquisitions
- Companies change things on the back end (“twiddle their knobs”) to improve their fortunes and have a united, consolidated front to prevent any lawmaking that might constrain them
- Companies then embrace tech law to prevent new entrants into the market or consumer rights (see: DMCA, etc.)
Given the state of things, should we just give up on the internet and go back to the good old days of the paleolithic? [Doctorow] tells us all is not lost, but that it will take a concerted effort both in the tech and political spheres to reverse course. The first tactic to take back the internet he examines is antitrust law.
For the last 40 years or so, antitrust has been toothless in the United States and most of the world. We’re finally seeing this change in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, EU, and China as these governments have turned their eyes to the decades of damage caused by rubber stamping mergers and breaking up monopolies is back on the table. This is a slow process, but a necessary one to regain control of the internet. That said, we don’t want to wait on the slow wheels of the justice system to be our only recourse.
When we stopped enforcing antitrust law, we ended good fire, we accumulated fire debt, and now we have wildfires. Our tech companies have terminal gigantism, and they’re on fire all the time. It’s time to stop trying to make the tech giants better. It’s time to start evacuating them so they can burn. In your heart, you know we could have a better internet than this one, and a better tech industry too.
Interoperability is how we “seize the means of computation.” First up is limiting the twiddling by companies behind closed doors without legal recourse for users. Comprehensive privacy laws with a private right to action are a good start. This lets you sue a company if your privacy is violated instead of hoping that a prosecutor somewhere thinks that enough people have been harmed to bring a case from the government end of things.
A couple other things that could help are ending worker misclassification through the “gig economy” so that workers are treated as actual employees instead of “independent contractors,” and applying existing consumer protection standards to search engines and platforms so that results are what you’re looking for instead of deceptive ads masquerading as the item or information you want.
Laws like the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) are another step in the right direction, forcing platforms to have APIs that allow other platforms to connect to them. This makes switching costs low for leaving these platforms that mostly get big based on network effects. What if a platform builds the API then shuts it down either for “security” or lets it deprecate to not working again? We have to make sure that Big Tech’s incentives are aligned so that their APIs running well is preferable to the status quo of behind-the-scenes twiddling. In addition to the mandatory APIs, we need to make it legal again to tinker and hack the services ourselves.
By restoring the right to mod a service to restore a broken API, then the platform has the choice to “keep the API and lose my discontented users or, nerf the API and get embroiled in unquantifiable risk from guerilla warfare with all of you. Against engineers who have the attackers’ advantage, meaning I have to be perfect and make no mistakes, and they only have to find one mistake that I’ve made and exploit it.” Since tech giants are driven by investors, and the only thing investors hate more than losing money is surprises, this gives companies a strong incentive to make sure their APIs are operating adequately. The largest stock sell off in history was after a Facebook investor meeting where they announced users had grown more slowly than expected. The uncertainty was enough to start a fire sale despite continued growth.
Another way to encourage interoperability is to use the government to hold out a carrot in addition to the stick. Through government procurement laws, governments could require any company providing a product or service to the government to not interfere with interoperability. President Lincoln required standard tooling for bullets and rifles during the Civil War, so there’s a long history of requiring this already. If companies don’t want to play nice, they’ll lose out on some lucrative contracts, “but no one forces a tech company to do business with the federal government.”
If you think this is all too fringey to ever topple the current regime, [Doctorow] reminds us that the current economic order seemed far fetched in the post-war US, but neoliberal economist [Milton Friedman] was ready. He’s often quoted as saying, “Some day, there will be a crisis, and when crisis comes, ideas that are lying around can move from the fringe to the center in an instant.” [Doctorow] exhorts us to be spreading ideas of how to build a better world around, so that as we flit from crisis to crisis they can move to the center of the Overton window and succeed.
Be sure to checkout the full talk for more examples and colorful descriptions of what we need to do to build a “new good web.”
I dunno. You get a hundred smelly humans in a poorly ventilated room you might want an activated carbon face mask in addition to N95.
tl;dr get more laws made?
We have to remember, most people actively chose the current Facebook-Instagram, app infested internet, over simple HTML forums, imageboards, BBS and other small corners of the internet (which mind you, are still present and active)
Most people don’t like my POV but I say let everything remain as it is. The people who use the app version of internet obviously aren’t the same demographics who would care about the other internet that was present 20 years ago
Yep – people like appliances, they like “an car”, they like stuff that ‘just works’, and they like new stuff. Demand incentivizes supply and a product meeting requirements will be made, and oh boy did they do a good job.
I have a friend who understands that Tiktok can be assumed to be a spy tool, but that friend is not concerned about it. I assume said friend trusts the government to handle national security and, well… that’s probably top 5 reasons our government was formed! But he downloaded the app and the curated content streamed into his rectangle for free. He is happy, and so is Tiktok.
The enthusiast’s dollar is less green than a disinterested customer’s dollar. Enthusiasts cross-shop, try unusual things, probe boundaries. Disinterested people “just want the thing to work” for “the usual stuff”.
We are enthusiasts, and we are not the target market, but we are to some degree being drug along through our social connections. The only thing we can do is help make the groups that try to give us what we want profitable. Look seriously at where your hard-earned dollars go and who you give data to.
— sent from a years-old Librem 5 on the company’s MVNO
The main issue is that these “small corners” either disappear when their sole maintainer gets bored and walks away, or if it has any sort of popularity then it eventually gets bought by some larger company, that then tries to monetize it and either turns it to shit or just deletes it as unprofitable.
There’s also a missing item in Doctorow’s list:
Large corporations do not understand the products they’re trying to buy and sell.
There’s a big disconnect between the upper management of a corporation or a conglomerate that manages multiple branches and lines of business, and the actual production floor. These are economists who barely understand anything about what they’re selling, except that it sells or it doesn’t. Whenever a small startup is bought up by a larger company, the reason and motivation for the existence of the product gets lost as the people responsible for the product lose their voice or get replaced entirely. The management will then try to continue some superficial cargo-cult version of the software or service while cutting all the “unnecessary” fat out: they’re liable to throw out everything that was useful as waste and replace it with some market-researched consumer group targeted bullcrap, because that’s all they know.
John Gall identified this principle as: “The larger the system, the less the variety in the product.”
No, most of those choices are passive, because of the amount of advertising and herd pressure towards some service that is only available from one supplier, and all your friends are on it. Cos they didn’t know any better either.
And you’re missing the core tenet of ensh_ttification which is that once the monolith has firm control and dominance of a market, they turn up the rate of profit extraction while letting service deteriorate. Do you think search is getting better? Are you pleased at giving yet another corporate entity permission to sift through your digital entrails every time you install another app?
That’s the paradox of advertising: it’s supposed to inform consumers about the availability of products and their qualities so consumers could choose between competing options, but it’s actually used to eclipse competition. The one that can afford to buy all the billboards and ad-slots will sell the products, and the consumers do not even know to demand the other – and you’re paying for it as their customer.
How would you know about the existence of some niche website or software, when the google search algorithm will “optimize” it away to page 25 behind paid spam.
Disagree, it is an active choice. Take the exodus from Twitter as an example. People knew they wanted to leave “X”, but they point blank refused to use Mastodon because it didn’t have the shiny million-dollar UX you get from corporations. They waited until the founders of Twitter started a new VC-funded alternative and chose Bluesky instead.
People didn’t avoid mastodon only for the UI, there was also the various servers and different rules between them. The average “user” had no patience or willingness to learn HOW to social media when a corporation offers it so simply on tap 24/7.
“tl;dr get more laws made?”
I wonder. If companies are making billions of dollars… What is the problem of spending some of those dollars on making sure that you comply with laws?
I mean: that money is there, but what is it spent on now?
And seriously, it doesn’t need hundreds of extra employees to make sure that the company stays lawful. It only needs conscientious leaders, making conscientious decisions.
In that sense, it means that if the leaders of a company make unethical and unlawful decisions, they cause the company to loose money. Because the company will have to litigate and probably pay fines and damages. So, being an honest leader would pay off for the company.
It all stands with enforcement. If nobody actually enforces the laws, company leaders will get away with and even profit from being unethical.
At least the EU seems to have some understanding of this.
“What is the problem of spending some of those dollars on making sure that you comply with laws?”
They have lawyers who keep everything by law but If complying with law is more expensive than paying fines than they will not comply with law. I worked in a company that was dropping their sewage to local river from time to time when sewage treatment plant got broken (let’s say 6-8 times per year). The river was going through town so the smell was everywhere. The fine was less than half of a salary of their cheapest worker. Once the fine rose to 3x salary of a technician (still not really a lot – they didn’t pay well), sewage treatment plant operation became priority and not a single event happened for 3 years straight.
The first step of enshittification is to use investors money to legit be better then existing HTML forums or whatever. No one is happy with the current stage 3 status, but most people are utterly helpless to fix it. That burdern lies on our shoulders.
There are many things we suck at too. Let’s hope that in exchange the tech illerate fight for our rights in those areas.
Here lies the problem – “No one is happy with the current stage 3 status” – that is simply not reality – no one on this site? probably yes. In your social bubble (or mine)? Probably yes, but overall? No. Try talk about online privacy issues to some ordinary non tech people – preferably Gen Z. The will get bored in like 10 seconds – they don’t care, because they simply don’t see it as a problem.
A year ago i tries to talk with one of my friends, who happens to be politician (we are small country, it’s not that uncommon) about right to repair and what can be done. His answer was: “Nobody will do anything – too few people care for it to be viable political topic, so no party or politician will do anything as nobody cares really.” Maybe he was wrong, maybe not, but at the end that is kind of what is happening. Most people are not unhappy, they don’t care. And regarding right to repair – look at apple – they decided to solve the problem by becoming a cult. Try to talk to some apple fan about how their products are designed to fail – they will not listen – they don’t care. They love their apple devices.
Apple became a cult long before the company chose to exploit it. They started off as a legitimately good company that made useful stuff, gained a loyal following, and then lost the market to Wintel because they got stuck in their ways.
However, when the market shifted, it was like setting the pot to boil. All the smart frogs jumped out, which left only those frogs who are happy to be boiled alive, and they were enough that Apple could re-structure as a “premium” brand while not actually offering any premium over its competitors. It’s because of their past success and fame that they became a cult, and found themselves in a position where they can exploit dumb people.
I think one of the big issues is that people are purposefully funneled into these sites. I can do an exact word for word search for what I actually want, knowing where it is and that it should be a top result, yet it is nowhere to be found because they failed to pay the google tax. Furthermore, try getting a small business to show up preferred in google, you can be the best at what you do with perfect real reviews, but the big companies pay to be in the first results and often implement false reviews.
Andngod forbid you are in a market google wants to own. Remember the sites that were the best price aggrigators? All gone because google shopping. And google shopping sucked so hard it could de-chrome a trailer hitch in point oh two seconds flat. Too bad they cant de-chrome android thay fast.
The internet sucks, unless you follow a very specific niche and get around with other people in the know. This is why /r or “reddit” is in so many searches now. Nobody wants the trash google pushes. They get the actual information they wabt from other humans…. On a forum… That alone speakes volumes.
cough usenet cough
In turn, I find it impossible to take seriously someone who judges another’s ideas based on their choice to wear a mask at a public gathering.
+1
… and feels the need to make it known to everyone.
Having read Little Brother, I suspect the mask is to visually obfuscate his face. Different paranoia.
Considering I can google his name and find photos of his face I don’t think you are correct.
also noticed a lot of this from femboys on pr0n hub.
It’s not just the internet; ensh1ttification is unfortunately widespread. It’s just about anywhere one or a very few massive corporations dominate a market, particularly for services. The solution is the same: anti-trust law, break up monopolies, enforce competition, protect and empower consumers.
What the EU does.
But not the US. The US seems to currently be ruled by cowboys who want to go back to 1860.
Imagine being ruled by people who seem to strive to anull 165 years of progress.
“I progress, because the circle I’m walking is wider than my memory.”
The main issue with the US is over-reliance on regulation instead of law, and then regulatory capture by large business interests. The “return to 1860” is in part about dismantling that.
The difference is that regulation operates within the ambiguities of law, where the law defines a rule and regulation is the way the law is interpreted to apply. When laws are written broadly and ambiguously, or “special agencies” with “special powers” are established, then regulation can be used arbitrarily without any democratic process – which basically means the regulators can do whatever they want within the limits of the law that they themselves set. When people, especially on the political left, call for more regulation, they’re calling for more arbitrary powers for the government, which then invites big money to take over said government and use the powers for the opposite ends.
Kinda like so much of the constitution has been nullified by stupid lawyers that “interperate” it, despite it requiring zero interpretation. “Shall not be infringed” regarding rights is something they seem to ignore. Evil people will twist words to get what they want, always. Bad intentioned manipulators should be sequestored from harming society. Vis-a-vie, any entity that optomizes for profits over human rights, dignity, and equal opportunity.
Or, just give us our land and resources back and let real freedom reign.
what progress? progressives of the last 10 years seem to be about undermining the progress that has been made in the previous 50 years. you end up with a lot of policies that strain the already overstretched government, nuke the economy, create new untouchable classes, and take away the freedoms that got us here in the first place.
seriously?
Yes, really!
Ah, if only the real world were half as good as the hallucinations of libs suggest it is
yeah i think you put your finger on it. i don’t view the problem with shitty things on computers to be that severe because there is such an enormous diversity, i can opt into whatever different flavor i want. but the same trends that make a lot of online services suck are affecting ‘brick and mortar’ services as well, and in that instance the monopoly seems more complete, more stifling. i can’t just download a better local grocery store after kroger buys up all the competition the way that i switched from debian to devuan in protest of systemd.
Part of the issue is the “consumers are the product” mindset, where you’re not trying so much to sell something to your customers, but to sell your customers to someone else – sell their info, their membership, ad-views etc. to make more money on the side.
Instead of just paying money for a product or service, you have to register a user account and join the affiliate program, agree to terms and conditions for selling your info – heck, I can’t even take my car to a wash anymore without joining a club because there are no more service stations where you can simply hand over cash or card at the counter for a ticket at the machine. All the machines now demand a phone app to enter.
It’s not even about being a monopoly – they’re all doing it, because the tech giants like Google are paying them for the data, to better secure their market dominance and control. It no longer matters whether it’s a bunch of small companies vs. one giant corporation taking over as a monopoly, because they’re all effectively acting as subsidiaries anyways. What used to be an online problem has crept into brick & mortar world.
Yes.
30 years ago I signed up for a grocery store loyalty program.
I thought it was neat to build up points for discounts or less hassle when making the payment.
But, I also bought prescription drugs from the in-store pharmacy.
I don’t know if it was effective or not, but I made the drug purchases separately and didn’t use the loyalty card.
The main problem I have with much of Cory’s talks is that they don’t get to the root of the problem, and the solutions provided are not actually viable solutions.
As you say, enshittification is widespread, but few actually dig into the right literature to understand that this is the result of the standard business model. A model which has been promoted at the expense of the market (towards greater concentration as market participants leave, as in a sieve).
The model is designed to have front-loaded benefits, a period of diminishing returns, and then become unsustainable before failing, the latter part is strictly tied to the funding which is often provided for by banks that have access to money printing (preferential loans funded by an inflation tax that enrich the few). Keynes mentions this in some of his writings.
You might have a thought that the characteristics we see seem to follow similar characteristics found in ponzi schemes, and you’d be right but rather than focus on the underlying problem the talks are taken in isolation while promoting greater equity through greater regulation. These would never solve the issue, and only make them worse because they are based on flawed premises/assumptions, and the failures involved in that solution are very much structural failures of centralized hierarchical systems, or central planning (Socialism/Communism).
Mises wrote about the structural aspects and their failure modes for these type of systems back in the 1930s in his collected works which are usually available and aggregated in a book, “Socialism”, but few people are aware of his works today.
There is no real way to enforce competition. The lack of competition today comes from two simple sources. Entry to Market is impossible due to increased arbitrary Cost, and preferential treatment and arbitrary market control from lack of regulatory enforcement (the kind which don’t involve fines, but complete breakups and divestitures).
Also, its worth mentioning that few realize that inflationary (fiat) economies naturally trend towards non-market socialism with runaway printing, businesses need to make a profit to produce in the market. When that is no longer possible in terms of purchasing power, the only entities that can are those that are state-controlled/dependent (through preferential loans). ATT is a perfect example where they have 100+ year loans, exceeding assets, leveraged buyouts funded by central banks almost guarantee that most publicly traded business meets this criteria.
There are intractable problems with the talk that negate most of what is said, and the solutions proposed are not viable.
I went through the issues specifically in some detail just now but apparently moderation decided published literature by well established and respected experts (circa 1922 originally) doesn’t meet community standards (silently removing the post).
If you have no concept of the underlying problem that led to this outcome, you have no hope of correcting course when inevitable dynamics wound in earlier stages run their course, and any band-aid will only make it worse.
Most of the issues are covered in a book. I’d suggest you try to find the book I’m talking about, apparently certain keywords are being filtered, including the author’s name so I can’t provide much more than a roundabout hint. There were papers which constituted part of the book, find the book, its available free of charge. It should only take two to three searches to find it with the hints provided.
“If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.”
We have a case study in market value and APIs: Reddit. And it did not go well for anyone other than Reddit.
You meant the “new” pricing scheme for getting access to the API?
They recently topped it of by basically making any future protest impossible.
eg. https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/30/24253727/reddit-communities-subreddits-request-protests
So users are basically left with these options:
– Illegal DDos
– deleting their own accounts (and leaving to other platforms which don’t really exist)
Reddit was one of the most successful DoD projects in recent history. Incredible psyop engine. Made everyone irritating as hell but you have to recognize a good play
Long comment part1:
Given all Cory Doctorow’s good work I can accept his eccentricity in this regard, and I say that as a a guy who spent 2020/21 protesting against lockdowns, wearing an “Anders Tegnell for primeminister” T-shirt, and who never wore a mask. I can agree with the opinions he presents about the decline of the internet, I can do that knowing I don’t have to agree with the opinion he appears to be projecting regarding 2020/21, via that cloth. People who get something right, and he’s diagnosed the decline of the internet very well, must be praised for that regardles of what we feel about other opinions they may hold. I would however suggest there is a real need not to simply rely on laws to stop ensh-ification, but also to have some companies, or otherwise non-commercial organisations, formed who’ll openly defy bad laws in their efforts to provide tools so the public can get the better service they deserve. Afterall, new laws always get exploited by lawyers, and too many of these attempts to reign in corporate big-tech end up making life easier, not harder, for censors and monopolists. Whoever pays for the more expensive lawyers can always make laws work for them, when faced with big corporations, who concerningly aren’t even affected by market forces any more (in which case they could be outcompeted by firms willing to respect the consuming public instead of respecting bureaucratic fiats) but instead stay rich from government contracts, there is a real need to undermine ensh-ification at the technical level too.
There is the organization “None Of Your Business”, https://noyb.eu/en who defends privacy rights.
Long comment part2:
Where he says organisations which hold the terms of service of big tech in contempt, and openly violate them the way big tech did on its way up, are considered “radioacitve”/”toxic”, well those sort of organisations are the ones I’d feel more comfortable as a consumer in doing business with. He’s right that changes in law would be good, but because the big tech monopolists will simply buy their way to change laws to their advantage before parliaments even vote on it… there do need to be open source technical efforts to find ways to defeat censorship, surveillance, DRM that interferes with our right to repair and tinker with things we paid for… and all the other aspects of ensh-ification too. He should really big thinking about alternative phyiscal architectures for the internet, community hosted and independent of corporate owned telco networks, think laser link optical comms to get information silently across the borders and in to censorious countries… as well. Alternative physical architectures, physically immune from being compromised by corporate and governmental pressures upon companies known to own them, are going to be a really important part of de-s-ifying the internet.
I’d be very interested right now to see a debate between Doctorow and Musk, the thing I think that would most interest me is seeing the little bits of common ground they’ll have. For example, Musk’s cars have some instances where there’s pretty nasty DRM messing with customer’s ability to repair them, Doctorow will be rightly furious at this. On the other hand, Musk’s social media platform, for all its flaws and idiotic insistence on logging in to view and its scheming up ways to stop nitter instances working, has done a noble job of defying a censorious brazillian judge. Musk has recommend virtual private networks to defeat the censorship which brazillian people have been using in record numbers despite threats from their government, and Musk was good enough to offer Starlink service for free to all users in Brazil when that power-crazed judge decided to cut off payments to Starlink (a totally separate company from the social media network with a well known name based on avian sonic communication) as part of his vendetta against the social media platform. I’d like to see Musk and Doctorow sparring against each other on everything else, then coming together on agreeing censorship is wrong and that any method that lets it be evaded is a good thing.
But Xitter is just full of Nazis now. Why is that a good thing?
If we aren’t willing to extent free speech rights to everyone, however awful some people may be, then they aren’t really free speech rights. And Nazis in particular get absolutely demolished when forced in to the light of free speech where logic can tear down their lunatic ideology. Also, and more significantly for discussion on Hackaday, there’s a real difference between arguments about content and who is producing it, vs the technical arguments about the importance of systems being free, at the technical level, of intrusion by governments and megacorporations. In the end, the systems we all need, the only types of systems which can halt the en-s-ification of the internet, are those immune to tampering by both governments and corporations. Sometimes we think Xitter has done a good job under Musk of resisting some government interference, Musk’s defiance of that Brazilllian censor was satisying to watch, but not a complete enough job given Xitter were willing to censor in Turkey when the government there demanded it. If a system is capable at the technical level of censorsing those we dislike then if a corporation’s board of directors, or which political party is in power somewhere, changes, then our side ends up as the censor’s target. The perfect platform needs to be something neither a government nor a corporation can interfere with, working out how that can be done is a “hard problem” (I suspect it may boil down to something which can be proved a mathematically hard problem too), but one well worth study, and undoubtedly one which both governments and corporations hope nobody does study well enough to find a solution for.
i think a lot of the censorship on hack-a-day comes from the fact that its owned by a uk company, iirc, and uk is really starting to crack down on free speech, throwing people in jail for their posts, etc. its only a matter of time until a blog for the hacker/maker community gets declared forbidden speech and shut down. its a slippery slope, give an inch and they take a mile.
Words have consequences, Should someone who posts lies or even truth that lacks context but with the intent of inspiring hatred not face consequences for their obvious crime?
A lot of this comes from the fact that they use Akismet which uses models from Automattic to pre-judge posts, and preemptively muzzle conversation. The company leadership and investors have a vested interest in deamplifying certain subjects.
Some may be warranted such as with hate speech, others most definitely are not warranted such as negative sentiment towards certain economic systems that shall go unnamed (when they’ve been demonstrated rationally to fail).
There’s a body of thought that if you can’t speak of a thing, then the thing doesn’t exist. This is not backed by science, but many subscribe to this out of convenience and personal benefit at the expense of everyone else.
The related coercion becomes intolerable, and psychologically damaging to intelligent thought. There is a lot of academic study in this area by well established authors, but any mention of the books or author’s involved gets your post yanked (silently).
Its not just a UK thing, its a broad effort.
hard problem…But Cory, if you’re reading this… please see if you can find a solution, a way to make an alternative internet which is immune from censorship, surveillance and DRM right right up from the physical architectural level.
id rather everyone have free speech so i know who the nazis really are. rather than who im told they are. echo chambers do little good for anyone other than the usual demagogues and rabble rousers. there are a lot of people on all parts of the political spectrum acting like joseph goebbels that need to be called out and delt with accordingly. free speech is how you do that.
Because it’s funnier
exTwitter regularly removes a lot of content at the request from different governments without even a fight which is in stark contrast to how Twitter operated pre-Musk. No one had a real good grasp how much exTwitter removed since they stopped publishing the transparency reports after Musk took over, but they recently published one recently which tells the story of how often exTwitter is bending over.
This is a pattern that is also repeated personally by Musk were he often bans people who points out his hypocrisy or flaws, or just for having an opinion that differs from Musk.
That Musk decided to fight the Brazilian supreme court is an odd decision until you realize the views Bolsonaro have expressed publicly. It should be said that the way the Brazilian supreme court went about the whole thing was very heavy handed. In the end Musk caved though, probably because someone made him see that both the legal problems and the amount of lost users would adversely affect exTwitter in many ways, and now there are lawyers from exTwitter in Brazil doing damage control.
The sheer hypocrisy of the man is mindboggling and I cannot for the life of me understand why people think he is “free speech hero” which he isn’t in the slightest. I’ll just end with a Musk quote that shows how mercurial he is, especially how he reacted to the order from the Brazilian supreme court: “By ‘free speech’, I mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.”
I guess decisions from a country’s supreme court isn’t the law.
Why would a person who advocates for the law stomping down on social media giants support Twitter’s efforts to not follow the law? Musk is just measuring his power level to see what size of a country he can take on without severe repercussions
Elmo would probably buckle to Tuvalu if they stood up to him.
Why would a person who wants the law to stomp down hard on social media providers support Twitter’s efforts to not follow the law? Musk is just measuring his power level to see what size of a country he can take on without severe repercussions
people in masks are kind of an uncanny valley for me. gives me an uneasy feeling and makes me want to draw my katana.
such a samurai, much brave, so manly
What has the year got to do with anything, I assume you are bothered because of the most recent global pandemic. But folks have elected to wear masks for years before Covid made it ‘required’ at times, and wear them for many reasons. More and more folks are doing so now simply because the air is so full of dusty probably plastic crap they’d like to keep out of their lungs…
And at a convention full of strangers who all likely travelled a long way to get there your exposure risk to many novel illness your immune system is little prepared for is about as high as it can get outside of being a medical professional in the ‘wrong’ areas. So wearing a mask though it can only do so much is perfectly logical precaution to choose. For all you know he may only be wearing it because he is already ill and doesn’t want to spread it too easily!
And as some folks have health problems anyway…
[ ending worker misclassification through the “gig economy” so that workers are treated as actual employees instead of “independent contractors,”]
I was in college studying computer science during the dotcom boom and graduated during the bust. I remember looking at the nacent gig economy and thinking how awesome this was going to be. I was going to graduate, with such an in-demand degree, jobs would be plentiful and easy to get so having to look for a new gig every so often would be no stress. I would work somewhere from 6 months to 2 years, make a crap-ton of money then take a vacation for however long I wanted to. Then finally when the money runs low, repeat. Piece of cake! My career-bound parents never had such freedom.
Given in part the timing of my graduation and the bust… I became a bit more cautious. While most of my fellow graduates flocked out west to still try to live out that gig plan I stayed back in the midwest. It took me FOREVER to finally get a job in my field and that job sucked. Finally, almost a decade after graduation I found a good place worth staying as a full time programmer.
But I noticed that my friends who had left for supposed techtopia… while they were making more dollars than I was (when they were working) the cost of living out there was like a completely different planet. And the stress of searching all the time between jobs… it makes people age. I for one don’t ever want to go to a job interview again! So now they are chronically stressed out and barely treading water economically. Meanwhile I’m building my 401k and looking forward to an early retirement.
F the gig economy! That cake was a lie!
after completing my it program and failing to find a job, came up 4-f when i tried to join the military, and ended up doing a commission based gig job putting bicycles together for retail stores. after doing that for 4 years my tech degree got really out of date and the sad thing is i never used it outside my internship. retirement plan, hah, im going to die in my 50s from overwork.
We’re still here.
Watching…
Waiting….
There is one corner of the internet that started in the 1980’s
It was an Apple ][ program called Diversi-Dial.
The only ads it had were 256 letter message slots.
These would scroll once an hour (as set by most sysops).
All text, no fancy graphics, no ad trackers etc.
You sent cash or check in the mail for a password.
This got you extra time on the system and you had a little email box
that only worked on that system, so no spam at all.
It’s the place I know I can hang out, chat with friends, and not get
bombarded by ads, etc. All the ads etc. in my opinion need to go away.
When FB blocked me for not using my real name, they said I couldn’t use
the platform until I did. My reply to this was, without users, FB would be
a fart in the wind, as empty as MySpace is.
Their reply: don’t you want to keep up on what your friends etc. are doing etc.?
My answer: I already do that without FB. I don’t need to have it posted on social
media that someone’s kid took its first dump. The internet itself is diseased.
Infected with people who have only one goal, to suck as much money and information about people as possible, and push as many useless ads at you.
I have never bought anything or replied to a spam message or phone call.
Never will either. My FB account? Still there. Haven’t logged in in 15 years.
I survived without the internet before the internet was widely available, I can
survive without it again. This ad driven information stealing behemoth of a
network is nothing but trouble. You have to use ad blocking software to get
anything done. If you want to use our service you have to see ads.
Well, when you pay for my internet connection, I decide what gets to my PC.
It’s a war that will never end until people have had enough..
“Enshittification isn’t inevitable.” It is once you get an MBA from a proper indoctrination camp.
I am surprised and disappointed at the hubris evident in most of the comments here, all the versions of “of course, the average person won’t understand and isn’t going to be interested in fixing the enshittification of the internet,” and I’m wondering if engineering schools have de-emphasized the humanities too much.
Engineers are pretty smart, about a few things, but in my experience, many of them tend to think that they’re smarter than they actually are about a whole range of other things.
Where are the bold hacker anarchists and 2600 types hiding these days, the ones who are brave enough to be hacking all the surveillance devices and DRM-ridden crap that we’re being sold today?
The humanities have been a complete fraud for decades. They learn nothing of culture. They usually don’t even read anything. Maybe that’s part of the problem
Why point at the engineer? Engineers explicitly design things to work, while corporations explicitly design things to make money. The rift is clear
Andrew, many of the actual conversations where the science-backed details are discussed to help educate, are being removed by moderation.
What you are seeing is mostly one-sided and not reflective of the whole.
The barrier of entry was what made it great.. You can’t do that post 2003..
The dumbest person in the community knew at least one programming language, and Assembly was what Python is today..
Yeah. A lot of modern problems come from the naive morality which demands that massification can proceed without destroying everything good. It’s always insisted that there is some occult tweaking that we can do to the massification process to solve this. Avoiding massification is completely off the table, unthinkable
I used to visit a hacking forum that had an artificial barrier to entry. The signup form had a “simple” security challenge, you had to put something like an XSS or SQLi attack in the forum. It kept the board very slow (like 1/50th the traffic) compared to other boards but much higher quality.
But that forum is dead like so many others. They get eaten by the simplified, easy websites. Reddit and Discord have consumed most private forums.
I see similar effects with private torrent trackers. Limit signups, require some seeding ratio, minor moderation, and quality goes through the roof. In this area though, the barrier to entry is enforced by governments taking down easy-to-use pirating software and leaving only the arcane.
Repealing the DMCA would be a good start.